One question - what’s the best practice as to where to place the survey. Options I am thinking of are - 1) Button on top of every page or 2) pop up at the time of exit. Any thoughts or are there off the shelf packages to achieve this.

We have recently released a free survey that does this now, please check out this post:

http://www.kaushik.net/avinash/2008/03/4q-the-best-online-survey-for-a-website-yours-free.html

Hope this helps.

-Avinash.

De hecho yo utilicé un tiempo surveymonkey, una herramienta gratuita de encuestas para preguntar esas mismas preguntas y en buena medida me ayudó a tomar la decisión de cambiar el enfoque de este blog.

Bien, pues ahora Avinash añade una pregunta más: qué es lo que más valoras de nuestro site, y un rating de satisfacción entre uno y diez y ha salido 4Q ( 4 questions ) una aplicación gratuita, en beta todavía y sólo en inglés ( de momento ) que se puede personalizar y a la que podemos añadir nuestro logo.
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Where do you recommend placing this 3-question survey, and how prominently? I assume that if you put it at the point of conversion, you will not reach many people who do not even get there, but if you put it on the homepage, you will have people unable to answer questions 2 and 3.

Thoughts?

For example:

My first survey on a large ecommerce site had 24 questions (all on one page in a pop up). I was positive it would stink - and I said so to the survey vendor.

The response rate (completed forms) was 18%.

I was astounded. And embarrassed because I was overlaying my own opinions on what the customer might do.

Of course since then we have fewer questions, much better surveys (ajax and everything!), greatly improved targeting systems etc. Which each the response becomes better and more importantly our ability to listen has dramatically improved.

Moral of the story: 1) Experiment, it can’t hurt that bad and you might just be proven wrong (or right and then you’ll know for sure). 2) If you allow a mechanism to your customers to speak, they like to talk.

Hope this helps.

-Avinash.

You bring an interesting perspective, but I believe that data, in this case, can be deceptive in the insights it can provide.

Here is a example. I come to your site, I am looking for a job (or support or a product I saw in a store or ….) and you don’t have it on your site. How would the web analytics tool tell you that? The survey would.

Or I am on your website and it stinks at major things. How would you know? You can look at top exit pages. You can look at segmented content or visitors. In the end you will have to rely on your, potentially limited, point of view (and experience in life) to guess what stinks. If you use a short survey you can let the customers tell you.

In the end here is a good way to think about it. Web Analytics is good at the What. It is not good at the Why. The Why can only come from the customer.

Here’s a post that might be interesting:

Overview & Importance of Qualitative Metrics

Hope this helps,

-Avinash.

I think that this does not make any sense, what is the idea of asking those three questions?
Using your web analytics tool , you can easily answer the three questions by yourself easily. in addition you won’t spend your precious time going through a lot of spammy answers.
I think that those three questions enter into the game powerfully when it comes to offline marketing.

Thanks

Welcome to episode #71 of Six Pixels Of Separation - The Twist Image Podcast. In this episode, we take a deeper look into what people are looking for (and why) when they visit a Website. This episode has an amazing CarCast with Bryan Eisenberg and Avinash Kaushik. There’s even a Six Points of Separation tie-in. This is a deep one with tons of philosophy and insights about consumers, their online experiences, voice of the customer, and where the Web will (hopefully) go. I am also playing with the length of the show and would love to know what you think. Enjoy this conversation…

Since many clients have nothing at all (and typically are not ecommerce focused), I leverage Usability Sciences’ WebIQ, which gives you both the transactional and the qualitative data [no confustion...this is not a transactional toolset -- it is not focused on transactions in total].

At Texas Instruments, where I gained the greatest hands on exposure to a breadth of tools, I relied on data both from HBX and from WebIQ.

I assume that you need to be able to specify when and where the survey would be asked, and that this would need to be done as folks were leaving the task you want to measure? Is that right, and is there anything else that you feel is important?

25% of visitors report failing because of a specific problem. If I fix that what should I expect?

Great things, no doubt:-) But is there any way to guess how great?